Breakout Manchester: Underworld

I've waited a while to leave this review as I didn't want it to be jaded by only my second ever fail. 

The room looked good, one of Breakout's better rooms and on the way in our host told us that it had a very low escape rate, no clues for the first 15 minutes and the only clues on demand. Fair enough, that's how we like to work anyway. 

Then we got going, all started off very well but soon found a lot of the puzzles were deliberately designed to be time sinks. We probably could have split up more at the start which would have given us more time later on so that fail was on us. 

Later on the puzzles are very linear and that's where we became stuck as we missed something and wasted far too much time on it which meant we hit our 60 mins with about 3 puzzles still to go. To his credit, our host did give great clues when requested. 

When he came in and told us what would have come next we asked about some earlier puzzles and he did say the room was always be going to difficult for a team of two due to the time they take. Where one puzzle requires a person to just stand there for a good chunk of time I'm not sure that would be giving someone who paid their £25 or so the best value for money. 

Also, some part of the more linear parts of the game are in a space where two of us were tripping over each other, bringing a larger team to reduce the difficulty is going to leave some people unable to take part in what is going on. 

I think I'd have appreciated the website telling us that it was near impossible for a team of two to complete if that really is the case. Would I still have booked it? Yes, I think I would, but at least then I would have felt a little less hard done by if it was down to me ignoring a warning.

I realise I am coming across a bit bitter in this and in fairness some of the puzzles were really clever and really satisfying to solve and with a really good range. But most of the difficulty comes from the time taken to complete tasks once you know what you're doing. I've always preferred difficulty that comes from the volume of puzzles rather than time sinks. 

Take a team of 2 experienced players and see if it was just a skill issue on my part. I'd say take 3 or maybe 4 at most, but even at 4 you're going to struggle to all be involved at parts.